How to find your blog’s focus

January 29, 2017

tags: blog, blogging, customer service, focus, lead generation, marketing, plan, sales, tactic, topic

by Wade Kwon

New bloggers often struggle with the most basic question: what to blog about. But even corporate blogs face this challenge.

Blog anyway.

This might strike fear into middle managers everywhere, but it shouldn’t. Plenty of marketing plans move forward with no defined goals and poorly conceived action steps.

A blog and a blogger can find their voice through practice. The most likely outcome is … nothing. The blogger runs out of steam, either from competing demands or lack of ideas or lack of institutional support. Why bother if no one in the organization can be bothered to contribute ideas, posts or promotion to a fledgling endeavor?

A lucky few will find that, after 6 months, the blog slowly comes into focus. It could be pure marketing. It could be recruiting and humanizing the company. It could be customer service, offering not only information and assistance, but a broader look at trends, best practices and one-on-one advice.

A different approach is to examine the marketing plan for the year ahead and determine how a blog can enhance those efforts. It could be to extend the brand and increase consumer awareness of a company’s products and services. It could be to drive traffic to the sales section of the site. It could be to kick-start lead generation with in-depth posts. It could be to build customer loyalty by preaching to the choir.

When we decide on the blog’s role, we can then determine topics and tactics. We want topics that are fresh and those that are done to death. Each post, done properly, enhances our search ranking and brings the right visitors to our site over and over.

The tactics should include regularly scheduled posts (at least once a month and ideally once a week); promotion of posts; networking with bloggers who work on similar topics; analysis of metrics; and fine-tuning content creation. It’s a lot of work, and most companies will either need to bring in more people or drop other less-effective strategies.

Finding the focus can be challenging, but it’s not impossible. It is impossible without actual blogging. But a sharp focus can not only bring more fans and customers along for the ride, but also keep out those who would never spend a dime or provide only drive-by traffic.

And the sooner we start, the sooner we find it.

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